Tom Amandes
Tom Amandes is an actor, born 1959.
Chicago theatre produced him, and American television has kept him in near-permanent employment ever since. His break was a lead: Eliot Ness in the 1990s series The Untouchables, an upright-man part that set a template he has been playing variations on for thirty years.
The variations are remarkably consistent. He is cast, over and over, as the professional you are supposed to trust. Dr. Harold Abbott on Everwood, the local doctor whose certainties keep getting punctured. Dr. Pelikan on Parenthood. Dr. Thomas Reed on The Guardian. Dr. Kalfuss on The Good Guys. Dr. Baker in A Million Little Pieces. When it is not a doctor it is a judge in Perry Mason, a pastor in Eastwick, a vice principal in Dirty Deeds, a recurring part in Spin City, an intelligence man in The Terminal List.
That is a specialism rather than a limitation. Amandes is very good at the moment where a decent authority figure has to say the thing that will hurt, and he plays it with no visible technique at all, which is why the same face works in a family drama and a military thriller.
In film he tends to turn up as the reasonable man inside somebody else's crisis: Geena Davis's boyfriend Hal in The Long Kiss Goodnight, Doug Davis in Brokedown Palace, Davis Wilkes in The Bachelors. He also played the astronaut Jack Schmitt in From the Earth to the Moon.
Movies (9)
TV (16)
- Everwood (2002)
- Parenthood (2010)
- Spin City (1996)
- The Guardian (2001)
- The Terminal List (2022)
- Perry Mason (2020)
- Eli Stone (2008)
- From the Earth to the Moon (1998)
- The Riches (2007)
- Eastwick (2009)
- The Good Guys (2010)
- Against the Wall (2011)
- Women's Murder Club (2007)
- The Untouchables (1993)
- The Deep End (2010)
- Promised Land (2022)
Where to start with Tom Amandes
Everwood is where to meet him. Harold Abbott is the best part he has had, a small-town doctor with a strong sense of his own rightness and a family that keeps testing it, and the series gives him years of material to build with.
The Untouchables is the historical curiosity and the rare lead: Eliot Ness played entirely straight in a 1990s series most people have forgotten.
After that, pick by tone. The Long Kiss Goodnight casts him as Hal, the last normal person in a very violent film. From the Earth to the Moon gives him the astronaut Jack Schmitt. Perry Mason and The Terminal List are the recent work, a judge and a company man, both played with the same unshowy authority. Parenthood is for completists only.